What good is a pogo stick anyway?

With yet another birthday on my horizon, it seems as if this might be a good time to admit some of my failings.
So here goes:
•Stilts. I watched the kids trying to master the stilts at Jay County Historical Society’s Heritage Festival and was strangely pleased to see they found this as difficult as I always have. There’s something about lifting up the right side at the same time you lift your foot up off the stilt that doesn’t work for me. I’m not sure I am wired correctly for stilts.
•Pogo sticks. Does anyone really enjoy a pogo stick? Let’s be honest. It’s a horrible invention intended to injure children whose parents were foolish enough to buy the silly things. One or two bounces is all most people can get before falling over. Okay, maybe three if you’re especially coordinated.
•A stick shift. This one is truly embarrassing, particularly for a guy. There’s something macho and masculine about mastering a stick shift. But I was raised in an automatic transmission family (not sure if that’s a religious or ethnic differentiation) and never got the hang of the thing. Now that my daughter Sally is learning how to deal with a stick, I find this truly humiliating.
•Harmony. I love hearing it, but I’ve never figured out how to make it happen. If I’m standing next to someone who is a natural alto, I just don’t get it. Perhaps I am musically simple minded.
•Playing serious chords on a guitar. I’ve fiddled around with a baritone ukelele for years, but it has four strings instead of six. I have enough trouble with four.
•French, Romanian, Russian or any other foreign language. Along with failing to master a musical instrument, this is the most common regret for Americans. My French was pretty good in high school, at least by Marguerite VanDyke standards. And I did OK in college. But when faced with French speakers in real life, I am a mess. Romanian is much like other Romance languages, but I still struggle. And Russian? My vocabulary tops out at about a dozen words.
•Swimming. OK, I won’t drown. But I’ve never had the confidence a good swimmer has. My wife does and my children do. I’m counting of them to rescue me.
•Spinning a basketball on my index finger. Enough said.
•Flying a kite. I try this almost every year on the beach at the lake in New Hampshire, and I’ve had some degree of success. But I’ve never been able to get the kite aloft the way I’d like it. I blame the beach or the lake or maybe the whole state of New Hampshire.
•Gambling. I have never, ever been good at it. I approach the challenge with the assumption I will lose money, set a limit on how much I’m willing to lose, lose that money, then walk away wondering why the heck I did that. Am I missing something?
•Plastic models and decals. There was nothing quite like — when I was a kid — roaming through the aisles of the Art Craft shop on a Saturday morning with your allowance in your pocket. Sure, your allowance was 25 cents and you couldn’t buy much with that. But the boxes of plastic models were seductive. World War II fighter planes, hot rods, you name it. Trouble is, when you tried to put them together they never came out quite right, especially the decals.
•Riding a unicycle. This is something best left to circus performers.